Leaving Facebook is easy. Here's how.

August 30, 2017

Facebook is awful.

It chews up too much time.

It’s watching you on every website you visit, all the time. It’s basically a massive surveillance operation. How does this work? In short, using those innocent looking 👍 buttons that are plastered all over the web. You don’t even need to interact with them. Facebook makes gazillions of dollars by selling what it knows about you. Read more here.

It is an organization that ruthlessly maximises its profits (nothing wrong with that) whilst simulataneously not paying attention to its impact on society and democracy (my personal opinion).

So you want to quit Facebook? It’s simple. All you need to do is make Facebook boring. Here’s how:

Open up Facebook and pick a post from someone you hardly know, or even better, don’t know at all. Then click on the little down arrow in the top right of their post. Then click on unfollow. This way you’ll never see one of their posts again – and they won’t know it 👻.

Do this everytime you open Facebook. It’ll get harder to find unfollow candidates, but you’ll still be amazed how many there are. People who annoy you, people who bore you, people you don’t like, people you’ll never see again, …

Once you’ve done this for a length of time, you’ll find your itch to return diminishes more and more. In the end, you’ll stop coming back at all. But your account’s still there. Should you ever need it.